The language most organizations reach for when describing their culture is the language of teams. Teams have members with defined roles. Teams execute plans. Teams win and lose together. It is a useful metaphor for some kinds of work, but it is not quite right for academic departments and colleges, where the work is simultaneously individual and collective, where authority is distributed rather than hierarchical, and where the relationships that make institutions function are built over careers rather than seasons.
The metaphor I work from is community. A community is a group bound not by assigned roles but by common purpose — by shared attitudes, interests, and commitments that create genuine fellowship rather than coordinated function. Communities are more durable than teams because their foundation is relational rather than structural. They can survive leadership transitions, budget cuts, and institutional upheaval in ways that team-based cultures cannot, because their cohesion is not dependent on any single leader or any particular organizational arrangement.
That framing comes naturally to me as a political scientist who has spent a career studying civic engagement. Putnam's central argument in Bowling Alone — that the erosion of social capital weakens not just communities but every institution embedded within them — applies directly to academic departments and colleges. A department with high social capital navigates difficulty with resilience. A department without it fractures under pressure that a healthier unit would absorb without incident. Building and maintaining that social capital is, in my understanding, one of the core functions of an academic administrator.
What Community-Building Looks Like in Practice
Community does not build itself. It requires deliberate, sustained attention to the relational fabric of an organization — and that means specific practices, not just a general disposition toward collegiality.
At every institution I have led, I have made individual relationship-building a genuine priority rather than a pro forma obligation. That means sustained, authentic interest in colleagues' scholarly work, their teaching challenges, and the professional questions they are working through — but also their lives outside the institution, the things they care about beyond their job titles. People who feel seen as whole persons rather than as functional units in an organizational chart are more willing to take risks, more willing to contribute beyond their formal obligations, and more willing to extend trust when an administrator asks them to move in a direction they cannot yet fully see.
At Radford, community-building has taken concrete institutional forms. The Public Policy and Democracy Lab and the Student Community Center — spaces I created by repurposing departmental real estate — exist precisely because community requires physical infrastructure. Students who have no shared space have no shared culture. The student advisory board I created to advise on departmental inclusivity was not a compliance exercise; it was an investment in the kind of relational knowledge that makes a department genuinely welcoming rather than nominally so. The alumni advisory board I founded extends the department's community outward in time, connecting current students to a network of graduates who have navigated the transition the students are approaching.
Faculty community has required different investments. Reallocating travel funds during budget cuts was not just a financial decision — it was a signal about what the department values and whose work it is prepared to protect. Nominating faculty for awards, both internal and external, is a form of community investment: it tells colleagues that their contributions are seen and worth celebrating beyond the department's walls. Mentoring pre-tenure faculty is, at its most fundamental level, an act of community cultivation — integrating new members into the norms, expectations, and relational networks that make the department function well.
Community Across Institutions
One test of whether a community-building approach is genuine or situational is whether it transfers. Mine has. At Fort Hays State University I built departmental community across a fourteen-year tenure that survived multiple budget cycles, a leadership transition to chair, and periods of significant institutional stress. The Times Talk program — a weekly public affairs discussion series that I founded and that continued for fourteen years, long after I left — is the clearest evidence I know of that a community culture, built well, outlasts the individual who built it.
At the University of West Georgia I inherited a department of sixteen faculty across two campuses with distinct cultures and histories, and worked to build common purpose around enrollment growth, program development, and civic engagement in ways that brought the two groups into genuine collaborative relationship. I also chaired the Chairs' Council across the institution, which required exactly the same community-building skills at the college level — finding common ground among chairs whose departments had different priorities, histories, and resource situations, and building enough shared trust to make collective action possible.
The Environment That Enables People to Lead
The goal of community-building in an academic context is ultimately the same as the goal of civic engagement in a democratic context: to create conditions in which people develop the confidence, the information, and the relational support to act — to lead from wherever they sit, to contribute fully to the shared enterprise, to take the risks that good institutional citizenship requires. You cannot mandate that kind of engagement. You can only build the environment in which it becomes possible and then get out of the way.
That is the leadership I have tried to practice, and the community I have tried to build, at every institution I have served.